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Category: Blogs

Merit Wars

Canada has never really had much of an explicit debate about what constitutes academic merit. But we’re about to, thanks to the Ford Government in Ontario. And some of the battle lines will look very close to the ones we have been seeing in the United States since the Supreme Court’s decision on Student for Fair Admissions v. Harvard three years ago. This fall, the Ontario legislature passed Bill 33. I examined this piece of legislation when it was introduced

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February 9, 2026 No Comments

Focus Friday: February 6, 2026

Hi everyone, Tiffany here. A quick reminder that Focus Friday is happening today, February 6th, from 12:30-1:30pm Eastern. Over the past few Focus Friday sessions, we’ve spent a lot of time sitting with the pressures facing postsecondary institutions: financial constraint, political intervention, governance challenges, and the sense that many institutions are being asked to change faster than ever before. Today, we want to shift the lens slightly. Rather than focusing only on constraint, this session asks a different question: what

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February 6, 2026 No Comments

Higher Education After Its Peak

Ever since World War II, higher education has been a growth industry. Maybe student numbers haven’t risen every year, or funding hasn’t always gone up, but the general trend has been positive. But right across the world, that upward trend has come under threat over the last decade or so. In Korea or Taiwan, for instance, youth numbers have collapsed, and with them enrolments have fallen and universities have closed. In the rest of the OECD, public funding for higher

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February 5, 2026 1 Comment

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

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February 4, 2026 3 Comments

Rays of Optimism, Paths Forward

Last Thursday and Friday, HESA held our Re: University conference in Ottawa. It achieved what we wanted it to achieve – to get people to have hard, tough conversations about what’s ahead and how to deal with the still-growing threat to Canadian universities. Today, I want to clue everyone in on a couple of highlights and meditate on a way forward. The opening session, with RBC’s John Stackhouse and two former Ontario premiers, Dalton McGuinty and Bob Rae, was in

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February 3, 2026 1 Comment

One Thought to Start Your Day

One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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